View full sizeExpress-Times File PhotoFormer Easton quarterback Terry Bartolet, left, and former Phillipsburg quarterback Dom Viscomi hold a memento from the 1958 game they played in this 2004 file photo. In 2004, like their game in 1958, both teams entered the Thanksgiving Day football game undefeated and untied.

In the sports-crazed Lehigh Valley, it doesn't get much bigger than Terry Bartolet.

Bartolet was everybody's All-American before Frank Deford's book and Dennis Quaid's movie.

The son of a gym teacher, he grew up in Easton's heyday in the 1950s, when Downtown boasted soda shop hangouts and stylish department stores. Suburban malls and promenades hadn't been invented, let alone ESPN or MaxPreps.

Easton has a rich history of athletic achievement, and if someone were to carve a Mount Rushmore into St. Anthony's nose or any of the city's rocky outcrops, Bartolet's bust would have to be on it.

It's not even debatable.

I wasn't close to Bartolet, who died too soon today at 71, but I know enough people who grew up and played with him to appreciate his stature as the quintessential schoolboy athlete.

He quarterbacked the 1958 Easton High football team that went undefeated and -- even today -- is referred to reverently by those lucky enough to remember it. That's saying something.

Bartolet starred in football, baseball and basketball, playing under a couple of coaches whose names you may have heard: Bob Rute and Pete Carril.

Here's how assistant sports editor Corky Blake put it in 2000, when The Express-Times named the top 100 local athletes of the 20th century (Bartolet was No. 50):

"No wonder when Bartolet hit high school he thrived in positions of leadership -- quarterback of the football team, shortstop on the baseball team, guard on the basketball team -- and doing so while playing for three of the giants of Easton coaching lore. It would be hard to argue against the theory that no Easton athlete ever assumed a greater mantle of leadership than Bartolet, and did so during a more glorious era of Red Rover athletics."

In 2004, I had a chance to interview Bartolet and Dom Viscomi, who quarterbacked the 1958 Phillipsburg High football team. I spoke to them in advance of the 2004 Thanksgiving Day game.

Since the first cross-river matchup in 1905, 1958 was the only time the two schools went into Thanksgiving undefeated and untied, until 2004. Bartolet got the better of P'burg in 1958, with Easton winning 26-6.

I asked Bartolet then about the Easton-P'burg dynamic, knowing that he was a part of Harvard's epic rivalry with Yale.

His answer was priceless.

"When you're 18 or 17 years old, this is the moment. It burns a bigger hole in your brain," he said then, at age 64.

Without hesitation, Bartolet said Easton-P'burg's rivalry was more intense than the Ivy League's.

"This is a stable community," he said. "Generations reside here after generation. Fathers play. Grandfathers play. Children play. It's probably the high point of society, as far as athletics are concerned."

Of course, it's what Bartolet did after graduating from the old high school at 12th and Northampton streets that cemented his legacy.

He turned down a pro baseball contract and went to Harvard, where he quarterbacked the football team and led the baseball team while studying on a path to medicine.

After graduating from Temple University Medical School in 1969, he launched a successful career as an orthopedic surgeon, maintaining a practice in Wilson Borough and working on too many Easton athletes to count.

His death will give pause to plenty of sixty- and seventysomethings who followed his exploits on the sports pages decades ago.

But it will be his roles as a gracious representative of Easton -- and a trailblazer of sorts for so many who would follow -- that merit the most praise.